Groundswell Publishing

I Cancelled NextGenLinks. Here’s Why.

Posted on 05. Mar, 2009 by joefission in Link Building, Reviews

NextGenLinks looked really promising. And I still believe that it is promising. It’s just not for me. It was a tough decision, as I love link-building services, but I just didn’t feel the service was worth the effort. There are so many services competing for money right now that you really have to cherry pick what fits your business the best.  That said, I’m sure it’s perfect for the right person, but until they clean up their inventory and mature the service, I’m going to pass on it.

The NextGenLinks Concept

For SEO purposes, building hundreds of links pointing only to your site’s home page doesn’t look very organic; nor do 100 links with the same anchor text. So generally speaking, when you begin building backlinks to your site, you build 50 percent of the links to your home page with varying anchor text; you build the remaining 50 percent to your top inside pages, again varying the anchor text. Fifty percent of the links will have your primary keyword, with the other 50 percent consisting of the remaining long-tails that you’ve uncovered.

NextGenLinks address this SEO concern with a system that builds as many links to inside pages as your home page. Because most sites have “money” pages with your best offers, you can also designate bonus URL’s that will get more links than other pages in the system. It also addresses the problem of relevance by making sure that links in and out are contextually relevant to the source or target. 

How NextGenLinks Works

Your first step when you join is to add your domains. I had a gold account, so I decided to load it up with 30 domains of varying types. I had a number of blogs, some conduit review sites, a StoreStacker, a few Build a Niche stores, and a few AdSense sites.

After you add your domains, you spider them with their contextual spider. What really should have been a one-click process — say a “Spider Domains” button — was a painful 48-hour exercise in frustration. Their spider has some serious problems, which I briefly mention below.

Once your domains are spidered, you grab your PHP snippet. You can either grab PHP code directly, or you can download a sidebar widget that you can add to your widget-enabled Wordpress blogs. You can place the snippet wherever you like, but it seemed to look best in the sidebar, in a 120×600 or 160×600 layout. You can define the width, but just setting it to 100% meant that it would fill your entire column, matching your layout better. You can also customize the colors in your PHP snippet so that it matches your blog, much like you can style an AdSense ad.

Finally, you individually go to each of your domains in the system and approve outbound links from your pages. You can submit up to 8 links per day per domain, but I wasn’t able to determine how your outbound links affected your inbound links. For example, outbound link building was so tedious (explained below) that I ended up with 40 inbound and 2 outbound links after a week.

So for an automated link-building service, it requires quite a bit of effort. And that effort is ongoing, as all outbound links have to be created manually. I don’t believe that’s necessarily a bad thing, as I like knowing that I can prevent links to bad neighborhoods, but it’s too cumbersome to do so. The way it works is you select each domain and then select the page from which you want to link. NextGenLinks will then identify contextual matches for those pages that you can review and approve.

This contextual matching feature is pretty slick. Most link-building services will match on a domain; but NextGenLinks takes this a step further and matches on the content of a specific page. For example, on one of my cell phone blogs, I had an article posted about the link between cancer and cell phone use. This post attracted a link from a cancer blog. That makes a heck of a lot of sense and adds to the organic presentation of the linking service.

I should also mention that inbound linking can be automatic or manual, whichever you choose. NextGenLinks recommends automatic inbound links, but after reviewing my first 8 inbound links (junk), I decided to manually review them. I ended up rejecting about 50 percent of the link requests, and only got one link that I would consider a good backlink.

The Advantages of NextGenLinks

NextGenLinks is engineered very well. In fact, in terms of site quality, feature forethought, and intuitive usability, it’s one of the easiest to use sites I’ve seen in quite some time. The dashboard views are excellent, both from a design and coding standpoint. But there are some irksome problems underneath the hood (see next section). Overall, I was very impressed with the service and its usability.

• You control your outbound links, so you can link to whomever you want. If you don’t want to link to a new PR0 blog, then don’t. Your outbound links are also contextually relevant, giving a very organic appearance to them.
• Your inbound links are contextually relevant on a page-by-page basis. This is absoluetly golden.
• Your links grow very naturally over time.
• You can specify bonus URL’s to receive extra inbound link love, which again is very organic. 
• You can build links to every single page of your site or blog.
• You can link out from only those pages you choose. For example, if you want to keep your homepage or your offer page clean, then do son. You control not just to whom you link, but from where you link.

The Problems I Have with NextGenLinks

Really, this is not an automated link-building service; it’s simply a link facilitation service. It will help you manage your n-way link exchanges, that’s all — it won’t handle them for you. That might be just what the doctor ordered for many people, but I was looking for what was billed on the box: automated, relevant links.

This next problem is not the fault of NextGenLinks, as it just isn’t mature enough yet to have a large inventory of sites, but I was inundated with junk inbound link requests. After the first 8, I turned off the auto-approve feature so that I could review them. Six of the first eight were from the same page on one site — I don’t know why I’d want six backlinks from one source, even if they do point to different pages. I’d rather use my allotment (there’s got to be some kind of allotment check) on different sources.

Several of my inbound links were from dynamic pages that had nothing on them but an error message. Pages get into the system via the spider, and then the owner must approve the outbound links, so the owner knows that he submitted a junk link, but once it’s approved (or auto-approved), you can’t get rid of it.

Out of all of the links I received (about 40 over a week), only one was what I would consider high-quality. There is a lot of AdSense junk in the system right now. I couldn’t find any sites whose numbers were comparable to mine in terms of PR and traffic, and I didn’t even add my flagship domains into the system.

Another minor issue is that there doesn’t seem to be any protection against reciprocal links. That is, I could link out to someone who had already linked into me. I didn’t try to link to a page that already linked to me, so I can’t speak to that, but there was no domain check.

The spider is terrible. Just terrible. The web-based spider is slow as molasses, and often didn’t spider the same domain similarly on different runs. Sometimes only a third of the pages would be indexed, sometimes hundreds (literally) of external pages were spidered. One of the spidering sessions took a good 12 hours to run. Six of my sites couldn’t be spidered at all — it just kept returning 0 URL’s.

There is also a downloadable spider, but it unfortunately generates zero-length CSV’s, at least at the time of this writing. Finally, you have another option: you can add URL’s individually. You need to enter a title, a description, keywords, and other relevant words. You can also fetch these from the meta tags, but there is a threading issue and it seems that the Ajax calls start to trip on each other. It doesn’t matter anyway, because the response times on the server are so slow that it often takes several minutes to perform one action. They have got to move this thing to a bigger cluster. For the limited number of members they have right now, that performance can only be explained by hosting this on a VPS account. Even a single dedicated server would have been appreciably faster.

And finally, to get the last ounce of frustration out of my stem: the UI is Flash-based. That means that the best browser innovation in recent years, tabs, cannot be used to speed up the perceived responsiveness of this process. Instead, you are treated to popups, and popups that popup other popups. It’s all very linear and entirely frustrating. 

The Bottom Line

NextGenLinks looks to be a very promising service. I know I mentioned quite a few negatives above, but in reality, much of those are the types of problems that will plague any new service.

While it’s certainly not automated by any stretch, being able to facilitate an n-way link exchange with relevant properties is gold. Especially when you consider that you can build links to inside pages as well.

But I suspect there will be some growing pains. They need more users and a bigger site inventory; they need to provide some community guidance to prevent webmasters from linking out from bad pages; they need some kind of quality guidelines or checks in place. Speaking of checks, they need some kind of reciprocal link alert or prevention function.

Considering that I was able to build 40 links to 30 sites in about 5 days time, I’d day there is enormous potential here to generate a consistent flow of relevant inbound links. Unfortunately, this flow requires a little too much effort for my taste. Time is always at a premium, and is usually the number one factor I consider when making a decision. With the number of link-building services competing for my wallet, there are others that meet my needs a bit better.

That’s why I cancelled my subscription.

Tags: backlinks, Link Building, NextGenLinks, product review, traffic